Mr. Hirohisa had made it clear when I called him from the nearest mainland city to the island — Nagato in western Honshu's Yamaguchi Prefecture — that there would be no supper provided that night; nor would he be able to pick me up ...

The three drunken U.S. Marines who stumbled into my motorbike headlamps were clearly combat-trained, as their agility in shifting from advanced inebriation to performing a nimble leap onto the sidewalk suggested seriously attuned reflexes.

When new buildings were constructed in 1971 at Matsuo-taisha in Kyoto, one of Japan's oldest shrines, the largely self-taught landscape master Mirei Shigemori was commissioned to create a series of gardens on the site.

TAIKO BOOM: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion, by Shawn Bender. University of California Press, 2012, 259?pp., $29.95 (paperback) No one can fail to be impressed by a live performance of Japanese drumming, the primal elements of stretched animal skin and wood striking a ...

Chiba is a large prefecture, something you notice while traveling from Tokyo to the southern seaside resort of Kamogawa. The journey takes a good two hours — and this by express train. Once past the city of Mobara, the JR lines enter a more ...

SALVATION OF A SAINT, by Keigo Higashino. Little Brown, 2013, 376 pp., £12.99 (hardcover) When the pregnant lover of a murder victim receives the sympathetic ministrations from the deceased’s wife at the funeral service, you know you are in no ordinary emotional terrain. This ...

Donald Richie was a scrupulous writer who paid finite attention to language and content. The following are 10 outstanding choices — titles that should be on any discerning readers’ bookshelf. “Tokyo: A View of the City” (1999) Here Richie manages to give the impression ...